The first relates to internal link structure. I’ve made the mistake you say you’ve seen so often. I have a primary keyword and have used that keyword in the main navigation, linked to a page optimized for that keyword. But I’ve also got a bunch of contextual links in posts pointing to that page, usually with the keyword in the anchor text. I now understand that those internal links aren’t helping much, at least from an SEO perspective. Am I better to remove that keyword and direct link from the menu and simply link the page from multiple posts and pages within the site. Or will I get better results leaving it in the main menu and changing the contextual links in the posts to point to a related page with a different keyword?
I really enjoyed your post, im building my own business from the ground up making custom furniture, lighting, and home decor. it took me a year to launch my website and now im trying to invite more traffic and ways for clients and interested parties to share my content and start buying my product. I liked the idea of Share triggers… im going to be incorporating that into my social media strategies. Any advice would go a long way. thanks again Brian
On another note, we recently went through this same process with an entire site redesign. The executive team demanded we cut out over 75% of the pages on our site because they were useless to the visitor. It's been 60 days since the launch of the new site and I've been able to still increase rankings, long-tail keywords, and even organic traffic. It took a little bit of a "cowboy" mentality to get some simple things done (like using 301's instead of blocking the old content with robots.txt!). I predicted we would lose a lot of our long tail keywords...but we haven't....yet! Not sure exactly why, perhaps I used a number too big and since my page is about classifieds, it probably seemed too much to browse through 1500 ads, I assume? Somewhat like you would post 800 tips for better ranking? Don’t know, will try to change things a bit and see how it goes, but you really gave me some new suggestions to go for with this article. Thanks again 🙂

Wow I wish I had the comments you do. So you’re saying that by re-visiting and re-writing old posts garnered 111% more traffic by updating old posts? I feel like I go back from time to time to do this, mostly to keep information current. This tip makes me want to revisit all my old posts to see what could be updated. That’s a lot of low hanging fruit. Thanks for this one.

Google has recently changed how you can use the Google Keyword Planner. Before, everyone who signed up could see the search volume for keywords. Now, it only shows estimates. There is a way to get around this. You need to create a Google Adwords campaign. The amount you spend doesn’t matter. After you do that, you will regain access to the search volume.

You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search results. If you do want to prevent search engines from crawling your pages, Google Search Console has a friendly robots.txt generator to help you create this file. Note that if your site uses subdomains and you wish to have certain pages not crawled on a particular subdomain, you'll have to create a separate robots.txt file for that subdomain. For more information on robots.txt, we suggest this Webmaster Help Center guide on using robots.txt files13.

Hey Brian, This article is really really awesome, Seriously you have covered all 21 points which i never read on anywhere over internet. Everyone shares basics but here you have shared awesome info specially that face book keyword research and 1000+ words in a post, and the wiki pedia ideas are really good and helpful. learned many things from this article. keep sharing this kind of info thanks
Google Analytics is an invaluable source of data on just about every conceivable aspect of your site, from your most popular pages to visitor demographics. Keep a close eye on your Analytics data, and use this information to inform your promotional and content strategies. Pay attention to what posts and pages are proving the most popular. Inspect visitor data to see how, where and when your site traffic is coming from.
Write articles rich in content. Quality articles will get ranked better in search results. Make sure that your articles address the needs of your readers, and that they can find all of the information they need in one spot. This is the most effective means for increasing traffic to a website; offering people something that they cannot obtain elsewhere, or at least, not to the level of quality that you are offering it.[1]

If you are using Responsive Web Design, use meta name="viewport" tag to tell the browser how to adjust the content. If you use Dynamic Serving, use the Vary HTTP header to signal your changes depending on the user-agent. If you are using separate URLs, signal the relationship between two URLs by tag with rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" elements.

Like you I am a scientist and like you did in the past, I am currently working on translating great scientific literature into tips. In my case it’s child development research into play tips for parents. I can already see that the outcome of my experiment is going to be the same as yours. Great content but who cares. I hadn’t even thought about my key influences. I know some important ones, but don’t see how they would share my content. I thought I was writing content for my potential customers. Is your SEO that works course the same as the content that gets results course? Sorry if I sound a bit dim asking that question.
Create a navigation menu. For easy navigation, you should create a toolbar with links that are easy to navigate and position the toolbar in an area that makes sense. Web users often look for the toolbar across the top or down the left the left hand side of the page. You shouldn't forget a link to your homepage. It’s often forgotten but very important to point your users to your homepage.

I feel I have great content…but most of it is within my email marketing campaign instead of my blogs. I’ve used my blogs to include links to my email marketing campaigns to lead to my product. In your opinion, should my blog content be the priority? I find my marketing emails sound more like a blog than just a “tip” or a reason to grab people to my list.

I have been trying to produce more content because I believed the lack of traffic was to the small amount of content, but after reading your blog post, i’m beginning to doubt wether or not this is quality content. I will definitely do more research on influencers on my niche, now I have to figure out how to get their attention with my kind of content.
For some reason I had to delete some pages, these pages are using the HTML suffix, so I blocked them in robots.txt use Disallow: /*.html, but it’s been almost a year, I found that google robot often capture these pages, How can I quickly let Google completely remove these pages? And I have removed these URL from google webmaster tool by google index-> remove URLs, but Google still capture these pages.